To me, the saddest part of this is that there are plenty of high-caliber female computer scientists out there right now -- Denning, Liskov and Wing, Hamilton (computer science and the Apollo program!), Greif, and many others. On a more prosaic and less-theoretical level, I recall that my copy of A Quarter-Century of Unix showed that women were key developers in many parts of that OS. But, of course, those were more elegant applications for a more civilized age.
It's pretty silly that although a common (and fallacious) argument against women as software engineers has something to do with math ability when a casual look at the wikipedia list on Women in computing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_computing) mostly lists women with theory and systems programming, which are arguably a lot more mathy than most work in tech. The ACM even had it's first female president in 1974!
